 Good evening, I'm Tom McCone, Executive Director of the Kellogg-Harvard Library. It's great to have you here with us for this poem city event. The library in the month of April is hosting 35 poetry events. And this turnout tonight, this is what's happening like every day. So it's really fantastic that poetry is so popular. Tonight we would especially like to thank Vermont College of Fine Arts for hosting us. And also for being one of the sponsors of poem city. As you can imagine, this is a really large undertaking for the library. So our sponsors are really important. So I will mention them briefly. Of course, right here, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Vermont Humanities Council, National Life Foundation Group, Goddard College, Hunger Mountain Co-op. We're all sponsors and help to make this possible. Also, the taxpayers of City Montpelier and the towns of Calus East Montpelier, Middlesex, and Worcester. Also, so, thank you to all of them. So Ryan Walsh grew up in West Virginia. He is the author of the chapbooks Reckoner and the Sinks. The Sinks won the 2010 Mississippi Valley Poetry Chapbook Contest. Ryan's poems have appeared in Blackbird, Ecotone, Field, Forklift, Ohio, Narrative, and Elsewhere. I'm not familiar with Forklift, Ohio, but the title captures my interest. Ryan earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And in 2011, he won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. It was a finalist. He is currently the Development and Writing Program Director at the Vermont Studio Center. And he lives in Burlington, Vermont. Would you please welcome Ryan Walsh. Don't get your- I'm not going to read a poem, but with that kind of intro, I should. I didn't bring one. However, thank you all for being here. This is a great turnout for poetry on a Wednesday night. So give yourselves a round of applause, really. Or give poetry a round of applause. Now, my role, as Tom just said, I'm the Director of the Writing Program at Vermont Studio Center, which is a really wonderful place. We're way up in Johnson. We host visual artists and writers from all throughout the U.S. and around the world. And if you've been there yourself as a resident or a visitor, raise your hand. Many people have- all of our readers have, obviously, yeah. So a lot of friends in the audience. And so what we do is, yeah, year round we host folks from all over the world, typically for a month, but two weeks to 12 weeks. And it's a really great community and a good feeling. And people just have that undisturbed time to dive deep and all day, just think about what they're going to be writing or the next piece they're going to work on. So all of our readers tonight, who I imagine are all very well known throughout the state of Vermont, have been to VSC in one capacity or another. And probably, I think in every case, have been there at least two or three times, if not six or seven. And so it's a real delight to be able to introduce these folks. And this is how we do our resident readings at the Studio Center three times a month. We have six really talented writers at all different stages of their career. And we just say, hey, you get 10 minutes to read. It's a sampler. It's kind of a conversation starter. And the poets always have the advantage because in 10 minutes you can read a few poems. If you're a novelist, it's different. So tonight we're celebrating poetry. All these fine readers have been to Vermont Studio Center. I will introduce them upfront as a group. And they will read in alphabetical order one after the other. And I will try to keep this short because really, in pretty much every case, they need very little introduction. And we are representing most parts of this beautiful state and very creative state of Vermont. With Kristen Fogdahl reading first, she lives in Morrisville and I think has been to VSC six times if my database count is correct. Her poems have appeared in really great illustrious journals such as The New England Review and The New Republic, Slate.com and Poetry Magazine. She's working on finishing a book-length manuscript that will be a remarkable debut. I'm waiting for it every day. It's going to be incredible. Kristen Fogdahl will read first. Followed by Major Jackson from South Burlington, who of his four volumes of poetry, his latest collection, Roll Deep, is just out last fall from Norton. He's a professor at the University of Vermont, also teaches at NYU and is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. We're very honored to have Major Jackson with us tonight. Followed by Laurie McPhee, who works at the Vermont Studio Center. Laurie lives in Johnson, has spent the past year as one of our staff, artists and residents, helping me with the writing program and now she's stayed to be our grants coordinator for the foreseeable future, which is great. She also is working on a book-length manuscript to be titled Bone Music. Again, look for it soon. It will be out in the world. And other poems have appeared in Forklift, Ohio and Brush Fire and the anthology Change in the American West. After Laurie, we have Karen McHaden, winner of the inaugural Vermont Book Award last year that VCFA sponsors for her book Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes. I think she's been to VSC twice, twice. I thought it was three or four times. We just read together, so I see you a lot. It's twice to VSC. She lives here in Montpelier and teaches at Montpelier High School, so very local. I'm really glad to have her as well. Julius Shipley is here from Craftsbury. She is the co-founder of Chickadee Chaps and Brods, wonderful, beautiful letterpress here in Vermont. And her debut full collection, Academy of Hay, is out now. It's really wonderful as well. She's also an author of Nonfiction. And Diana Whitney will follow Julia. Diana's here from Brattleboro, so we do have some Southern Vermont representation. She's been to VSC, I think, six times. Yeah, I got that one right. Her debut collection, Wanting It, came out last year and won the Rubri Book Award in poetry. She's also an author of Nonfiction, and I believe has a collection of Nonfiction ready to go in the works, as we say. So Diana Whitney, and last but not least at all, Baron Wormser, who also lives here in Montpelier, a former poet, Laureate of the State of Maine, author of many collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. And his latest book of poems is Impertinent Notes. So we're really delighted to have all seven readers. Kristen Fogdahl, Major Jackson, Laurie McPhee, Karen McHaddon, Julius Shipley, Diana Whitney, and Baron Wormser with us. So please give them all a hand, and Kristen will come up first. Thanks for coming out. I moved to Vermont about six years ago, and at that point I really thought that I might not write any more poems. I'm not exactly sure why, but it's easy to let the day-to-day demands of life that we all experience kind of crowd that out. But I think if you're an artist, you know the feeling of your own voice kind of going dormant inside of you, and that's a really hard feeling in many ways. And what happened for me is that a friend suggested that I go to the Vermont Studio Center for or apply to go for Vermont Week. And I found myself waking up, and so I'm always going to be grateful to the Vermont Studio Center for that. It's really been an incredibly special place, and I happen to live in Morrisville, so it's just down the road, and it makes it sort of too easy to hang around and try to get there. I'm going to start with that in mind with two poems that actually take place at the Vermont Studio Center. The first time that I was there for a fellowship, I hurt my back somehow, and I ended up, the cook ended up giving me a whole bunch of ice, getting constant ice out of the ice machine in the kitchen. And as a result, I got to watch a lot of the sort of day-to-day ins and outs of running the dining hall in over the course of that one day. And this is one of the things that I saw that I thought was pretty emblematic of the place as a whole. Right now the title is Spring Arrangement. I'm not sure that's the right title. You can give me suggestions afterwards if you want. Spring Arrangement, Vermont Studio Center for G. Todd Hawn. Morning rush done, sunlight stains the dining hall, stretches another blank canvas. Under the raw post and beam, an old mill scale stares into space, round clock face at a standstill. Outside, clouds from a vast kettle burst over metal roofs sodden snow mantles. Carrying a load of winter branches, you enter, woodman in a fairy tale, banging the kitchen door. Now the quiet breaks to the clip of your garden snips, reckoning out what doesn't bloom. You plant them in vivid water jars around the room. In a week, green leaves by the hundreds will explode, coaxed like code sent overnight, fatal and elated. As many of you know, the river that runs through Johnson and right through the campus of the Vermont Studio Center is called the Guion River. And it's also one of the four rivers that left the Garden of Eden, the Guion River. Four ways out of the garden and I chose you. At night, I open the window for company. Your voice sounds like wind, someone saying the same words again and again, a rhyme that only rhymes itself. At the table, one lamp to turn on. There we are, reflected in the glass. You share my body but keep moving past. It's not for you to dwell in any single place. I thought exile would change everything. Maybe it does where you are going. For now, tell me one more time about the rain. How it waters the tree of heaven. How we'll never go back. My own business and I do a ton of driving and so I have a lot of poems that take place in the car. I've been thinking about putting them together in a chat book and just calling it Drive. And this is one that came out of that. A New Testament. Farmland, bleary as a page, written out, erased. Stumps of old volcanoes on the sky. A hundred miles back, elevators, board, sigh, double room, double window, three deer walking single file behind the pane. Scrubby trees, train tracks, the woods had nothing to give. Now, fields ticking by, photos in a deck, and who am I but the lens, letting in corn stubble, busted hay wane. Once I expected a new heaven, new earth, everlasting life and a kingdom without end. Tonight, just this single lane. Up ahead, interstate, tungsten haze beginning to fire over the ramp, little stadium where games go on most Friday nights, and me pointing headlights past the stands, wishing consolation to victors and the stunned, dependent as they are on one another. Drumming up a hope for all scenes held together in loose confederation, mill towns, neon lights, bugs dancing across the all night grocery screens, steeples, prayer circles, a man slapping a boy outside on the lawn, a strained involuntary hope in perfusion, absolute nothingness. I'm also really fond of persona poems, and I'll end with this. Months back I was in a bookstore and happened to come across a book with a lot of photographs of relics, a particular famous writer, and one of the pictures was of a ring of hair, and in movies and TV it seems like human clones are constantly being made out of hair in some form, and I started to think, what would it be like if you really could do that? You could clone a famous writer or artist or whatever. What would happen? And this was the result of that question. The poet as human clone. This is no monster story. I never spoke with invisible gods behind a one-way mirror. My mother ignored the questionnaires. My father taught me to change a tire. No tile corridors. Later a representative did display the lock of hair, her dress, which could stand of its own accord as if it remembered. Now that I'm grown, I do the paperwork alone in the window of a coffee shop waiting for a train. I've come to see all existence as translation. Sometimes I even prefer the earlier version. Do I constitute progress? I can tell they're waiting for me to bloom. Lately what I like most is to ride the buses at dawn, right out of the city. Telephone poles beginning to flick the sky, my features swimming on the surface of the pain. Bits of cloud arrange themselves like notes on the wires where one could write the most magnificent score in a key previously unknown, unrecognized, even by the next me. Poems. Really delighted to read under the auspices of the Poem City and the Vermont Studio Center, which has been quite the gift for me here to in Vermont have had the pleasure of kind of writing there about myself. But I want to read a poem about another kind of residency, which is the Robert Frost House in Franconia, New Hampshire. And every summer they invite a poet to live there. And when they invited me, they didn't tell me that there is a sign off Route 93 saying next exit Robert Frost House. And so at all times of the day and night, I would get visitors or guests. People peeking in. And sometimes they would come in the morning and, which was always a surprise to them and me. Because, well, you can imagine the looks on their faces when they saw me walking around. And, well, here's the poem. I've arisen, this is from a letter, excerpt of a long letter to the poet Gwendolyn Brook. So this is a letter poem or a pistolary poem. I've arisen to dawn at the Frost Place. I've jerry-rigged a desk by the window overlooking a trail. I'm the new face of mountain poetry. Tourists come and go off hours, though, interrupting my ego's pursuit, a lasting chamber for my soul. The worst is when I munch a bowl of frosted flakes, pacing in my briefs, and a rite curious family peers in. They visor their foreheads, disbelief creeps across their face. I am the old man's ghost. As were 26 beforehand, the summer's we come to haunt the porch. As Billy Matthews put it to scorch-off morning fog, which I poke with my pen and swirl, it gathers cobwebby-like round thoughts I curl then write to their inn. The broccoli-top trees I see down straight after that to Route 93. Tourists abound this time of year. I wish I could install on deck, I've not the word for what they're called, an understanding boardwalk binoculars requiring a quarter that opens a shutter. Then suddenly the ocean's particulars are as intimate as your face. Buttery midday light, they'd see my mind sputtering to complete these stanzas stacked like bricks. Or mornings when I am my own exhibitionist, catching me in the mirror dancing nude, or toweling my hands or stirring brown sugar in my tea, in any case my back, rudely to their probing eyes. To protect my chi, I'd hang a sign, beggars disallowed, or peace-god, or shh, poet at work, to really back them off, beware of jerk. This is Enchanters of Addison County. We were more than gestural, close listening, the scent of manure, writing its waft on the leaves off Route 22A. By nightfall, I'll gaze fleck like loon cries, but no one was up for turnips nor other routes, not least of which the clergy. Romanticism has its detractors, which is why we lined the road with tea-lit luminaries and fresh-cut lemons. We called it Making Magic, then stormed the corners and porches of general stores, kissing, whenever cars idled, at four-way stop signs, or sought grade A maple surf in tin containers with painted scenes of horse-drawn farmers plowing through snow. The silhouetted, rusted farm equipment gave us the laid-back heaven we so often wished, and fireflies bequeath earth stars such blank and blank and bunk-a-bunk-bunk. And, of course, we wondered if we existed, and also, too, the cows and the ancient pastures and the white milk inside our heads like church spires and ice cream cones. Even after all that, we still came out of swimming holes, shivering our hearts out. That's okay. Let's go to a book. This is a poem about... I've been reading quite a bit this month, National Poetry Month, and I like reading this poem called Some Kind of Crazy. I stopped reading poems from my first book a while ago. It's about a guy in my neighborhood who used to walk around like he was driving a car, and in the process of walking around like he was driving a car, he would make the sounds of the engine, and he would literally pantomime, making turns and downshifting and speeding up whenever... I guess he pushed it in the fifth. He would suddenly start walking really fast. But this was a great delight for my friends and I whenever he would turn the corner as we knew it was going to be some fun. And girls often ask them for a ride. Some kind of crazy. It doesn't matter if you can't see Steve's Corvette turquoise color, plush purple seats, gold trim rims that make little stars in your eyes, as if the sun is kneeling, kissing the edge of sanity, like a Baptist preacher stroking the dark undecide of God's wet tongue. He can make you believe it's there. His scuff wingtips, ragged, shuffling concrete, could be ten-inch Firestone wheels. His vocal cords, fake an eight-cylinder engine that wags like a dog's tail as he shifts gears. Imagine Steve, moon-struck, cool, turning right onto Ridge Avenue, arms forming arcs, his hands a set of stiff seas overthrowing each other's rule, his life body and head snapping back, pushing a stick shift into fourth, whizzing past the stop and go, whizzing past the pawn shop. Only he knows his destination, his limits. Can you see him? Imagine Steve, moon-struck, cool, parallel parking between a pacer and a pinto. Obviously the most hip, backing up, head over right shoulder, one hand spinning as if polishing a dream. And there's Tina wanting to know what makes a boy tick, wanting a one-way trip to the stars. We the faithful never call him crazy, crack-brained, just a little touched. It's all he ever wants, a car, a girl, a community of believers. So those who laugh, I know you know what a pacer and a pinto is. You have to be a certain age to know what those ugly cars look like. Maybe some of us owned one here. This is my last poem, and it's a monastic, this is a poem, one of the poems in this book that I decided, I've been giving my students at UMEM writing assignments for years, assignments I've never done. So this writing assignment was to write a one-sentence poem, and it's called a monastic. And if you look it up, you'll see very simple sentences. But in the early 21st century, poets were trying to outdo each other by writing the long one-sentence poem. And my students know that they lose points if it's grammatically incorrect. So it has to retain integrity as a sentence. And it's a poem of great motion and cadence that I learned after writing it myself. So feel free to check my grammar, I'm okay with that. But the poem is about a group of guys who played chess in my neighborhood. They were known as the Bad Bishops, but a movie was made about them, and it was called Mighty Pawns, of which I named this poem, Mighty Pawns. If I told you, Earl, the toughest kid on my block in North Philadelphia, Bull Lake and Ominous could beat any man or woman in ten moves playing white, where he traveled to Yugoslavia to frustrate the beard and masters at the Belgrade Chess Association, you'd think I was given to hyperbole. And if, at dinner time, I took you into the faint light of a section eight comb, reeking of onions, liver, and gravy, his six little brothers fighting on a broken love seat for room in front of a crack flat screen, one whose diaper sags its a wonder it hasn't fallen to his ankles and the walls behind doors exposing sheet rock, the perfect O of a handle and the slacks of stairs missing where baby boy gets stuck trying to ascend to a dominion far into you and me with its loud timbales and drums blasting down from the closed room of his cousin, whose mother stands on the corner on the other side of town all times of day and night, except when her relief check arrives at the beginning of the month you'd get a better picture of Earl's ferocity after school on the board in Mr. Sherman's class, but not necessarily when he stands near you at a downtown bus stop in a jacket of size too small hunching his shoulders around his ears as you imagine the checkered squares of poverty and anger and pray he does not turn his precise gaze too long in your direction for fear he blames you and proceeds to take your queen. I've been here in Vermont for maybe 10 months so I feel like I'm the newest addition to this group. I came here in April of 2015 and luckily actually got to spend a month with Karen and Diana. Vermont slivered under my skin. I came back in June to be the writing program coordinator for a year, got a chance to meet Major and Julia and so it really feels like I've landed somewhere that's a family and I'm super happy to be here. Super grateful to Ryan. I'm going to start with a poem. If you don't know, VSC was an old gristmo so this is called In a Granary, Husks on Glue. I step over to enter the threshing. A knee high board slid between grooves in the jam wheat caught. By slumber our floor lies numb, grain littered from chaff in a barned corner of the house. Barn owl this room to eyes and sharp beak. Mortis and tenon woken shoulders, molting tongues in the hold broken open. This next one is the first one I actually wrote coming back in June. Anybody who's been to Johnson, this is called Jogging the Rail Trail past Parker and Stearns. A woman bends the distance then rises stoopes and rises her body the treadle of stairs a child at her side. Steel blade and olfactory cut biting timber at the mill the nausea of limbs sawed to lumber to dust just more memory. Vermont pressed like sap into an Oregon coast town and the child isn't a toddler but a dog though I saw a child so clearly I wonder where in the forest he has gone. As the mutt pulls leash towards my hamstring the woman says wild strawberries holds her cupped hand out flattened to dish says have one, they're my secret. The dog nosing my sweaty crotch strange whiskers to Lycra I take the unwashed dimple in my mouth swallow my thanks. I look down next to the trail see pimples hidden under clover my hands brushing poison ivy that won't begin to peacock morning until August each very smaller than my smallest fingernail a pink pearl at the eraser's end. The picked bruise making skin, sweat juices and in five minutes I'll have jam. I eat them singly at first then toss the batch onto my tongue spit stems like the first time my brother taught me to spit in front of his friends hands always with something 4,000 miles let this be what running brought me. All of these I've written at the SC I've been so lucky to be there for ten months I'll have a studio and have the privacy and time and space was such a gift. This one's called blue coat maybe I was wanting curious yes running fingers along my shoes shiny vinyl playing with the buckle lost in the beach with my big brother sand wedge between toes water's thunder over my shoulder it scared me how no one watched us go an elderly couple tried to call the phone books thickness so many words why couldn't they find Claire and Dan jangle of the dime as it kept dropping the slot everyone packing and drunk my five-year-old brother cried so it's not dripped distance voices screaming our names until twilight our bodies pulled close so when a neighbor laid his hands on my shoulders pulled me close and stuck his tongue in my mouth I didn't know I should bite when the scared butterfly tumbled my guts to be held by a man who pretends to be a grandfather peppermint ice cream and carnivals on the grass and eventually all he asked for was don't you kiss your parents good night until his tongue found my ear and he asked me to sit on his lap he wanted to play cards every time someone lost they had to remove a piece of clothing butterscotch candies waiting on the table my shoe on the floor he lost three times in a row dropped his pants I didn't run in the coldness of this winter I unzip my belly and tuck her inside I'm her blue coat now this is Vermont the days are growing longer and she can wander anywhere this one's called little fractures it's for my mom and anybody I don't know there's the wonderful lineage between mothers and daughters and I have one as well and so this is little fractures and it's for my friend her mother, my friends died her hands cut the liquid spill on sidewalk we sidewalk around the twig man a mucus plug we fell out of women hole then broken when they leave we are left little fractures my friend isn't a mother doesn't know the beauty of a daughter how I hope that for her be balm in the back garden than tea my mom disappears in tiny pieces sloughed not an earthquake the plaster shattered soon air will come in a can she'll claw like the red cross after a tornado her cilia tossed flattened her own lips the vortex how can I blame her how can I forgive her slow motion destruction if I could curl back inside I'd push her ribs aside I'd stay there ripening eyes open in the beginning just have a couple more my anybody who has a child knows how they can sort of read your mind and so my daughter had this dream a week before I had some great news great big news to share with her so this is called my daughter saved me while flying and that's from one of her dreams for Sarah in her dream my daughter saved me while flying invisible herried my body from danger in her arms and fought the part where she bled his leg more vivid I wonder what I looked like curled inside her airy embrace asleep but conversing with twilight maybe a feather for once instead of brick of course she knows not in any way more insistent than specter her knife ready to chop a stump from tormenter vivisection clean his one husk on marble such a Darth Vader moment the bandaid yanked clean off hair I've decided on next week seven more days of fair weather until I unhinge my children's future I got the sweetheart nights wrapped my pillow sewn into a tool belt so sleep little canvas dream my last one bone music a couple things you need to know about this if anybody knows about bone music it's in the 1950s American music was banned from being taken into Russia and so people would import it vinyl was also used by the government and so nobody had vinyl so they would steal x-rays from the hospital they figured out how to transcribe the music onto these x-rays so and that was they were called it was called bone music and beyond that let's see two other things we need to know typewriters you had to register with the police in the 50s and also that this is for one of my close friends Laura Lauren and her boyfriend Oliver who is a transman so this is called bone music if you're the man I think you are we'll press our ashes in vinyl sound etched like ribs around lungs manicured by scissors used to cutting cuticles quick central burn a slow cigarette after the scratched rhythm of blues in a hidden kitchen bubbling with vodka stew your skeleton a bootleg metatarsals scapula and clavicle sacrum nestled to a beat boy thrum I'll stand on your feet as we dance in the library no police to forbid an underwood our royals free a miter and clack under phalanges blown pinwheel and sideways one couch two lamps a mutt with brown eyes the golden dog walked daily journeys end if you're the man I'll trace uncensored circles on your back dissident x-rays you'll take illegal notes invisible vows howling our tongues a record another tattoo my coat your mandible song and I want to thank the studio center for some lovely time and some really productive work I was trying to figure out my first book and I had trouble organizing and I had trouble feeling like I was getting it right and so I broke into an artist studio while I was there and bought a box of pushpins at a general store and spent eight hours over three different days I spent about 25 hours walking in a circle and moving poems and walking and walking and the whole book was in a circle around the room I highly recommend it sorry Vermont studio center this first poem is called passerines and it's the word passerine is the order of songbirds scientific name for the order of songbirds passerines I want to tell you about the thud against the back door that my man says bird that later we see its tail sticking out from underneath the siding that its tail feathers shine like oil shifting purple to blue and we are kneeling on the wet decking the yellow of its stomach making it something more than the brown birds everywhere a tiny prize for kneeling there for prying back the vinyl siding to find a yellow bellied fly catcher it's cheek bloodied I want to tell you how he held it said passerine before it took flight little passerine songbird before she left I brought my daughter to Sanchez there were swallows like boomerangs near dark like here like everywhere I go I want to tell you about the neighbor the scientist who said they were swifts not swallows swallows are passerines but swifts are not passerine I thought passerine a more future verb tends for to pass a tense I can't know yet a passing I can't understand the order passerine is a mess the scientist said it's impossible to track its evolution I want to tell you I don't understand evolution any of it even mine becoming the mother I will be next the one who lets go once I stood on a bridge and a man taught me to call sparrows to eat from my hands told me he was a sinner that what he did for me was atonement which is a thing I might understand I want to tell you there is nothing like their tiny grip the way they quiver while they hack at your palm wanting to fly out of reach I want to tell you what happened when I let her go but I don't understand it yet I want to talk about this morning the little yellow bird in sudden dizzy flight the trees full of yellow how I lost sight when I was at the studio center I was struck by how quiet it is in the artist studio where you're not allowed to talk about music it's in headphones and I was struck by how quiet it is because I realized quite suddenly how loud the ringing is in my ears and how that would accompany me for the entire month and I thought about it every day all the time and then I had to go get headphones so that I could not hear it and it became my constant companion I wrote this poem at the studio center it's called against the ringing and it's hard to read because it's not punctuated and it leaps across a valley in the middle of the page it's a two column piece you have to jump across so we'll see if I can read it without making mistakes that's kind of the point though that would be hard to read right it would be hard to concentrate with the ringing against the ringing that I am able to sleep at all is a song for the ear it's office products tacking up and sorting what they can Malleus and Incas and Stapes doing nothing to earn their bread ear, poor translator if I could hear you I would I horn my hand at the table your elephant sister locust beetles all over the road carcasses and still the high wire hum of electrics when I tell you to cut you cut unholster the wire cutters and cut the nerve do it even though you are afraid there is no where I can go to be rid of it or walk in traffic anything in sand is quiet but me singing this song to myself that never changes bell on repeat and multi-tracked high tension wire hum voltage in the woods behind the school where you walk to say this was my home learn to watch the mouths move as a new language I've come as a tracker before the snow falls knowing the faces work there is a song for the middle ear ossicles and semi-circular canals and I want to say bone bone bone against the hiss dumb cilia, bad dog cochlea, not fetching all day I have done nothing I just moved to my pillar from Plainfield, Vermont where I lived next to a wonderful cemetery where I like to walk this is called the dead they worry I won't keep the graves when they're gone my mother brushing off her hands at her mother's grave surveying lots approving and disapproving care and neglect my father deep in thought the trees above them are the gods of massachusetts big-handed and quiet tall fathers approving the play of children in the yard somehow the graves meant new stories about who was buried underneath our dead becoming more real not only more gone when I walk with the dead here in my village I want them to say more than their names and relations lambs on children's stones more than the dates that must mean influenza or some illness that doesn't kill us anymore I don't want to walk the rose anymore wondering what shape stone I want which says more the obelisk or the square marble or granite and am I the wife of someone or am I not I want something to happen here some kind of story maybe the little ghost from my house will pick up her dress and run to show me her name or a flood will wash away the riverbank and a knot of bones or slow motion a hand will work its way up through the grass something the graves can do to us the way they trip me when I walk over them the soil a bit lower where they have settled these long dead I can play whimsy with unlike the dead my parents will be unbearable and new I'll read two more poems late winter in a handful of seasons water and cold and dirt get under the paint and it falls from our houses like old bark the river sends smaller and smaller flows of ice downstream crocus making their way up rocks are inside my shoes by the time I'm home five winters now I run my hands under your shirts start at the top to split the buttons from their catches and end the cold my hands make a set of wings under the placard moth or hawk I don't know which I am this last poem is a choose your own adventure poem it's got numbers down the side of the line so that you can go to the different numbered lines when the instructions invite you to it's called choose your own adventure loneliness I'm lonely you say to the wall at night in the village you forgot to pull the shades and you feel even lonelier with the world so big around you pretty soon you are really small from all the thinking about the what happens there on the red couch your knees up under your chin by now to get up and get a snack continue to line nine to get even smaller go to line 18 the cupboard with the peanut butter and graham crackers is really really far away 35 feet by your estimation and you reason that this is closer than most of the things you were just imagining like asteroids and gaseous belts and undiscovered civilizations so you go get a snack flipping light switches on as you go because it had become dark while you were thinking to run out of food go to line 32 to disappear go to line 43 your knees are like two mountains the kind that sheep graze tree lists and you look at them until they are a mountainous and you are still looking down at them because you are flying over them in a single engine plane a two-seater but you are alone people looking up can't see the temporary sunlight flashing against your wings aluminum you are curious about clouds that are coming in from the ocean mountains and clouds in you the little speck people can see from below as a kind of cross whining overhead to give up continue to line 32 to give life meaning go to line 40 there is nothing here you think exposed as you are and alone as if it is a kind of portent the map flipped open nearby tells the way to many places none of which feels possible no dot on the horizon any better to arrive at than this be hungry if you want nothing will fill you after flying over the mountains of your knees you consider shrines how still they are the human monument you spend a little lifetime as a shrine a limestone woman holding her son on the side of the road fenced in for safety so no one can take him from you like your ex-husband just did where the visitors and the curious consider you less than they do themselves their offerings not really for you anyway so um I think it was 1997 I've been working on vegetable farms for a number of years and um that means that once the harvest was in I had to find new work and one year I applied to the Vermont Studio Center and was accepted and so finished the harvest and came to the Vermont Studio Center and while I was there the place that I was going to move into for the winter was sold I was going to have an apartment there and they sold the building so back then before the internet you went down to the kitchen and there were little mailboxes with notes in them and mine said we sold your place to live so I kind of took that after lunch and went for a walk and thought about things and then I I went up to the office and I said would you hire me? and they did so I kind of came to Johnson because of those people that sold the apartment I was going to rent and um and then I naturalized after working at the Studio Center I continued to live in Johnson and then after five years I moved just ten miles away anyway I'm still here so um I was thinking this afternoon I realized that the very first public reading that I ever gave of poems was at the Vermont Studio Center and sort of appropriately enough it was outside in the garden by the Guillain River and then like three years later I grew potatoes there on that same plot so um a lot of my a lot of my work is concerned with food and nourishment but now it's starting to kind of think about about the body and um so here are sort of three three poems that sort of are kind of on this track I'm taking sort of exploring you'll see this is Soap Lady and she is at the Moutard Museum in Philadelphia if you care to visit her behind the curtain at the museum we meet her fat, concretion a mixture of the nighter of the earth and the salt and the exibious liquor of the body coagulated procuring someone in nerd to do a composition not exactly the stuff of Dove but near enough let's say it in layman's her earthly corpulence plus site specific acidity caused her to quantify so she remained with us a real colonial dame exhumed from philadelphia inside freaker emeritus but it's not the cake of her raw body which disturbs as her dropped jaw her preternatural ongoing howl about all of this I have never liked eyes on my thighs and at least 20 pairs there daily more strangers than she met when she was animate in her horror is apparent de facto her displeasure's war has worn out her mouth I can hear her soprano or ratio all these miles away but when I open my book to shut her up there she is in the picture of the Vesper Sparrow above her young each with its raucous famished life demanding and I would never I would never sign up for twitter and then when I had to identify myself write activist but this feels like an activist poem that came out it's called explain foie gras it's like le monsieur on coney island 62 hot dots in ten minutes that's one tube steak on a bun abducted every six seconds his body is sobbing them coughing them down his fist a sentry at his lips keeping the thing he's shoved in in he's hunched his eyes are squeezed close as he crams he nods he's almost dancing his cheeks bulge he convulses like he's vomiting them but inwardly so there's no pause just dog after dog this is what it's like for the goose who has the benefit of a fee who has the benefit of a feeding tube but who does not choose to feast and who cannot refuse and this last poem has five parts it feels less like a poem than a conflation of tampered plagiarisms so it's two things coming together juxtaposed one is the life histories of thrushes volume 12 Arthur Bentz histories he did these amazing books where a lot of citizen scientists wrote in with these incredible observations and then the other you'll kind of see is from news reports about drug mules so it's called oral history and the first part is eating habits I arranged it like Arthur Bentz would in his chapters so eating habits Snowberries were found in six stomachs, apple and three California honey suckle and two and juniper berries, wheat, ameth blackberries, fillery, pepperberries poison oak, buckthorn and nightshade were examined in one stomach each in the form of fruit or seeds she practiced swallowing green grapes and baby carrots then she filled the condom with white powder taped it into a pellet, dipped it in honey no problem so she swallowed 91 more an average drug mule can swallow between 80 to 125 pellets Professor Biel examined the contents of the stomachs of 4,013 olive-backed thrushes from widely scattered localities in the US and Canada the food consisted of 63% animal and 36% vegetable matter beetles of all kinds weevils, ants wild bees or wasps snails, sow bugs, angel worms Daniel found the thrush ate 19 worms between 8.30 and 1pm Matthew started out with 15 pellets and built up from there he was detained with 86 pellets of cocaine lodged in his stomach juveniles According to Cordelia, the fledglings give a clear, sweet whistle a soft, husky breathing sound the 12 year old the 12 year old boy's journey began in Nigeria where the drug smugglers gave him the condoms to swallow he flew 1,000 miles carrying heroin this caught because his body began to pass the condom the drug was hidden in while he was in a taxi if you pass midway you wash it off and swallow again she told the stewardess she swallowed 61 pellets courtship a young bird kept in confinement wood when a little over a month old suddenly mount an object a hand, a foot, pencil press its body down close upon it flutter its wings and open its beak the male pursues the female in swift flight his crust feathers erect and bill gaping he often bursts into passionate song as the two dodge swiftly through the thickets Stuart studied the song of one of these thrushes he figured that it's saying 4,360 songs per day or on average 9 times per minute instead of swallowing them she put them in a hollow dildo which she inserted inside her vagina the eggs are short ovate in shape 5 and 6 are the commonest numbers and sets of 7 are not extremely rare on May 27th the third egg in this nest was laid and the incubating sparrow then sat very closely it would not leave the nest when the bush was hit with a stick Franklin had to shake the bush violently before the bird would leave Rita agreed to be x-rayed and the results showed that she was carrying 39 drug pellets nestled in the wings of her pelvis a clutch it sang without pause for about 15 minutes first later snatches of songs successively shorter intervening pauses longer each note grows out of nothing swells to a full tone and then fades away to nothing so I'm honored to be reading amongst such fabulous poets I'm also proud to be representing Southern Vermont although for 6 years I lived up in the Northeast Kingdom and that time burns bright in my mind so I thought I'd read a summer poem that takes place right on the border of South Albany and West Glaver, Vermont maybe some of you have swum in this pond it's called hindsight it was the kind of night June was made for a night worth twice its weight in syrup lemon balm air like a soft damp cloth rung and rung by capable hands it was a thick night you could eat alive a souped up night of steam and ginger a night no one quite believed was real except it was there and ripe for the picking cash crop of love under the butter moon the boys and girls slipped out of their skins took the dark lake like a side long glance parted the curtains of cedar wood as the firefly meteor shower began one boy on the shore cupped a bug in his hands it was cold light perfectly efficient he showed it to the girl dripping oil and water how the bulb kept pulsing the night spread a rumor but the girl believed it her heart was a peach in a bowl of bones his heart was the stone and he hunted for insects spelling her name in fire on the sand he said look the moon's drawing water meaning forecast meaning rain but she heard you are the halo the weather changed then the night stepped out of its black and lay its head across their laps the pale night shone like a coin in a crack and they fell to their knees to palm it night of fingers night of tips shameless night that would not sleep pastel night she put under her tongue and sucked the sugar till sugar was spit then he slipped it quickly into his pocket swallowed up small picked up lint it swallowed its pride and turned to a pebble then a piece of gravel then a speck of grit so I had the good fortune or perhaps a misfortune of returning to my old high school to give poetry reading to AP English class and for me this was a really big deal and I was very concerned about what to wear and some people have heard this story before I felt like it was a Phoenix from the ashes moment because I felt very invisible in high school and there I was coming back with my first book but when I got there I realized that didn't matter whether I'd worn jeans or a dress because there was last period on a Friday afternoon and they were about to have a pep rally so there was this stamping and clapping that had been going on in the gym while I was trying to read some poems but it was I wanted to read them a poem that was set in the halls and it's kind of a racy poem and I thought we would talk about power dynamics or identity in high school so I'll read you what I read then I'll tell you what happened so this is called wanting it wasn't I beautiful wasn't I desperate didn't I give a shit about world peace inner peace only wanting it wanting it secret graffiti spelled out in lip gloss on the locker room wall the new underwire bit into my ribs pushed me up and I caught the mirror wanted it cocked a hip wanted it front seat back seat down on the floor brag of bruises blooming like plums on my neck tender bad and legitimate I wanted to ditch it wanted to drive alone in the car for the first time silence such concentration my hands tongue to the wheel I could see the brushstroke of each yellow line could feel my tires crush pieces of gravel and my tent toes alive inside my shoes firm and quick on the pedals there was an orange lodged underneath the clutch squeeze it and shift squeeze it and there those boys who juiced the halls with slouch and threw their bodies around the field they watched when I punched it to second, third burn my tracks along the high school tar they looked at me as if I could kill them they wanted to kill me back against a locker I could feel my body jammed up on metal my skin and ridges where the grapes dug in my skirt hiked up my muscles like fish my third eye watching from the outside in I was some other girl I was anyone's candy so I thought we'd have a good conversation going but everyone was kind of just staring down at their Xerox copies of the teacher I'd made can you still hear me? okay, yeah and so I raised his hand and he was all red paint and he had a Santa hat on and he said so what's the secret graffiti and he wanted me to explain the image in my poem like he could maybe get it right on the AP test so I had to tell him well that's just the point no one knows what the secret graffiti is first of all it's written on lip gloss they can't even see it on the wall but no one really knows how to express you know truths in high school but then it was time for the pep rally they had to go so I'm going to read two more I tell the story a lot and now I'm kind of writing a chapter about it in my memoir and you'd think that once you're like in your 40s you'd be over high school but there's a lot to figure out for me at least so I just got back from sitting with my mom she has Alzheimer's and it was a hard visit this is a dark poem but I'll try to finish up afterwards with a later one but it's in three parts and I actually chose it because I thought Jodi Biding was going to be here and she helped me revise it it's called Ice House one hazard lights in the breakdown lane three semi-stuck halfway up Searsburg Mountain the state trooper bending to set flares on treacherous ice roads winding slow east-west over the ridge where my mother is re-learning how to knit her marled stitches furl into a ribbon loose scarf for an imaginary child another project she'll never finish she carries the soft cowl from room to room couch to chair with the mystery she's been reading since August two why aren't the windmills turning when we pass they've raised the ridge line but those giant blades stand sentinel above the riddled snowpack tensions just trapped energy the teacher says rubbing the knot at the nape of my neck I want to believe her I breathe into the interstices imagine I'd be different with a different man would soften like a rag beneath his grip three out on the meadows the fishermen arrive in darkness live bait in littered buckets they light the wood stove in the metal house bore a hole through the ice feeling the netherworld murky reese and black mud the promise of slow perch in cold water they hook a bin out below the dorsal fin and it swims around the hole all day tethered to an invisible line battering the smooth walls the only way out is to be consumed the only freedom a mouth darker and colder is the frozen river so the last poem is the first poem I ever wrote about my kids I used to really prose was about I could write these sort of lighthearted essays about being a mom and then poetry was sort of like the mythic experience out in the woods but this one may be cross genres so that was the good news that I wrote it and then the bad news is now my older daughter who's ten and a half has forbidden me from ever writing about her again so we'll see if I can keep to that it has an epigraph from the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy resistance is useless curiosity on the northbound lane following the river I try to explain about the past earth eaters the first dozers and rollers laying hot tar over centuries of dirt my daughters still believe whatever I say mind me for knowledge practical and vast could the moon have a moon? Ava asks and I don't know it probably could have some asteroid ship or space station trash snagged into orbit satellite a crushed coke can or a bottle cap but it wouldn't last we can't steer the mother ship the girls want me always in the kitchen like a planet steady sphere with gravitational pull slow burn on the horizon all night anchoring their dreams and flannel and cold cream they want me cut loose on the tramp big crazy bounces playing Simon says moonwalk chase curiosity the Mars rover found water in red dunes trace molecules ices thin film in fine dust we hunted the meteorite deep on museum bedrock pitted hunk of solid iron radiant in the velvet dark 34 ton heart from the asteroid bell burned into being 4 billion years old Carmen ran through the hall of human history past pro magnet skulls and femur bones past DNA spiraling slow in a glass case to see what she'd been promised to lay her cheek against the cool hard evidence of space actually I just realized I wrote that poem with a Vermont couple years ago so so much gratitude to that place and to Ryan. So I signed up for it. I'm going to read through it and call it an Able. This is from my latest book Unidentified Slime Objects. This is a villanelle called Climb. Elise age nine worries about the ice and polar bears with no place to go. She lies in bed alert to her fraught life. Downstairs her mother weeps the words wife unfair too long elongate and explode Elise age nine worries about the ice her father tries to soothe this endless strife he talks like that full of what he calls woe she lies in bed alert to her fraught life where no beautiful animals entice little girls to live in homes of snow Elise age nine worries about the ice it glues melt mother's mutter knife the empty kitchen air paste tube and fro she lies in bed alert to her fraught life what's been done is done not so much in spite as fear love marooned on a flow Elise age nine worries about the ice she lies in bed alert to her fraught life there are a number of odes in this book I don't read one of them this is called the Ode to the DC Five which some of the elders in this room recognize as the Dave Clark Five you read that the basest in the Dave Clark Five has died and think you didn't like the Dave Clark Five that much they were peppy but not a whole lot more overdoing their British notion of joy that were thin in two minutes because it lacked sex and darkness that to the Brits credit the stones would soon provide but you're sad anyway because you feel how even nostalgia slips away how no one knows what George Washington was really like will never sniff his breath or watch him clack his dentures or hear him say a word like constitutional and that hurts not because you're afraid of oblivion which would be silly but because it's a drag how every story has to have the same ending that's the beauty of poems though how they don't care about that poems just care about a teenage guy fumbling around with the base and then starting to get the plunk plunk hang of it and meeting some other guys and starting a band or joining a band and thinking hey this is fun and hey I'm going to get laid and lots of good thoughts like that which come away before death and that are immaterial because although the music isn't immemorial it doesn't have to be because nothing has to be its failures are alluring as its successes maybe more so since genius is so rare the chance of some genius liver puddle ends coming together being about the same as you buying a powerball ticket and winning 63 million dollars which still wouldn't buy immortality but we'll give you a great stereo system to listen to the Dave Clark 5 after a while you realize you don't need a great stereo system to listen to the Dave Clark 5 that in fact makes the experience worse because you keep expecting something musical and that wouldn't be the Dave Clark 5 or its bass is thumping along like a flat tire and that pimply is spree feeling pretty bogus as the decades go down in a hail of gunfire and grief or quiet bank accounts or grandchildren but poetry doesn't care about that it's not an obituary it's a life jewelry which in its way the Dave Clark 5 was getting at how swell it is to be young and full of snappy sap and not knowing anything and not listening to anyone and being that much more than a gyrating body homing in on some homely lass who swrooms with the light at the opening bars of catches if you can even though she knows the Beatles are way better than this stuff it doesn't matter they're moments in life when anything will do with that you say yes to whatever is breathing hard in your face it's breath may be like George Washington's because he lived in some moments once upon a time and though he never heard an electric bass he must have wanted to rock out as a kid because kids always want to rock out that's what their bodies are telling them to pick up a bass or another person to share a nation and start rocking start clunking away and feeling that though it's just you some second-person pigment that one uncharted date will dissolve into the listless ozone doesn't matter because no one's counting how many ecstasy buttons you've pushed because one is enough people come up and say why didn't you like the day far cry okay this will be the last one I read a lot of poems that are collisions of somewhat bizarre nature this is called Jerry Lee Lewis and Nuremberg there was a movie called Judgement in Nuremberg about trials after World War II Spencer Tracy was in the movie you'll hear that in here I think that's all I have to explain Jerry Lee Lewis had it if you don't know Jerry Lee Lewis God help you Jerry Lee Lewis at Nuremberg thank you all so much for coming out this evening thanks to all the wonderful poets in unreal time as when a head dices up decades, centuries, millennia while slowly sluicing into the netherbog of sleep this is also titled The Killer for among other things his pianistic prowess appears at Nuremberg in a stiff wide lapel suit he could have bought at land skis in Memphis if he was from Memphis but he wasn't standing there with that too cool hairdo to confront the modest panoply of Nazis who are standing in for many Nazis who are there to take the rap and glad in there we are the superior race way to do that since it was a service to Aryans to cleanse the earth of scum which by implication included musicians humping pianos and 13 year old cousins while braying like country western boogie woogie banshees Jerry Lee has no time to dig this whacked out ideology he doesn't give a teenage shit about the tatters of their goose stepping zee hiling murder machine what matters is the sweet drugs in his love exercise mind an undressed woman and some get down hands hurricane a keyboard which is what a mind should hold so that when Gurren starts in with his witty repartee Jerry Lee says you are one sad mother fucker and the world for once gets what it is to be American and unafraid of what anyone thinks especially some Nazi slime ball who believes he's better than anyone else because he's from Europe and has a lot of unhappy history of his vicious asshole that got made into more history that soldiers like my uncle Nathan paid for with his life on the beach at Anzio his precious blood vanishing into the grievous sands of silence Gurren says something smug but Jerry Lee is busy waggling his eyes on the courtroom no chicks or pianos being serious is fucking boring being serious has killed a lot more people than not being serious the dream ends here in Hollywood Times Spencer Tracy is talking about the real complaining party in this courtroom which is civilization everyone nods at this large last word it sounds good like maybe you could use it in a song each syllable taught yet sibilant in its brief articulate leap though it doesn't rhyme with much though it feels like some wish something badly out of the tucks and to Palm City which is such a truly thing in the world to celebrate poetry all month long so long may it last thank you